Our instincts tell us that children and death don’t belong in the same sentence. Kids are supposed to be carefree, wallowing in life, romping in fields, laughing themselves silly, playing goofy games and tackling all those exciting adventures around the next bend.

Death, those same instincts tell us, is the province of old people, the aged and decrepit, propped up on park benches, looking at kids playing, but seeing only fragments of their own childhoods long ago.

In reality, however, life is too complex to be so simply categorized. Just as there are people in their 80s competing in marathons, there are children living in death’s shadow, with few, if any, good memories, but plenty of bad dreams. Some, in fact, are assailed by an existence so painful that death is a most welcome suitor.

Take Jesse, for example. It’s not his real name, but it will do for now. He was walking along Madison Avenue in Manhattan, weeping, insisting that he wanted to die.

The two woman with him weren’t impressed. He’d be fine, one of them told him. Many kids weren’t as fortunate as he was, the other one chimed in. These other kids, she continued, had nothing. He, she pointed out, had a roof over his head, food in his stomach, and clothes on his back. As they waited for the light to change at a typically-busy intersection, Jesse screamed that he wanted to die now. Then he dove into the street to make it happen. People gasped. Horns honked. Breaks screeched. Jesse lay in the middle of the street in the fetal position.

Implausibly — miraculously, perhaps — he wasn’t hurt. His mission had failed, but he’d have a zillions chances to try again. Jesse, you see, was only four years old.

These facts came to light during a foster care hearing over which I presided in the Manhattan Family Court. Jesse’s mother was dead; his father wanted no part of him; he had no concerned relatives, and he had been shuttled through a series of horrible foster care placements.

A psychiatrist testified that his suicide attempt had been made with a complete understanding of its consequences. Jesse really and truly wanted to die because nobody cared if he lived.

Last week, Belgium became the first country in the world to remove all age restrictions on euthanasia, a practice that’s been legal there and in the neighboring Netherlands since 2002.

While the bill, championed by the country’s socialist party, requires that children make a “conscious” request to be killed — Jesse’s state of mind would have certainly qualified — its original draft would have given parents the right to make that decision for them.

BROAD AVAILABILITY

During debate on that initial measure, several legislators argued that euthanasia should be available to anorexic children and even those just plain tired of living. That would be consistent with the broad availability of euthanasia to adults in that country.

Consider, for example, that death by lethal injection was approved last year for 45-year-old deaf twins fearful of going blind after being diagnosed with progressive glaucoma. That’s how far euthanasia has expanded in Belgium since its original bill limited it to those with “unbearable and incurable suffering.”

So while the child euthanasia bill seemingly limits the procedure to cases where a child is terminally ill, nobody in Belgium really believes that its availability to children will remain so restricted for very long.

In fact, demonstrating just how little the letter of the law really means to Belgium where euthanasia is concerned, Peter Deconinck, President of Belgium’s largest medical ethics organization, told a Senate committee in that country last July: “We all know that euthanasia is already practiced on children. Yes, active euthanasia.”

Add to that appeals for equal rights for distressed children in that country, and it’s just a matter of time before kids, and parents on their behalf, are accorded full access to euthanasia on the same, increasingly wide-open terms available to adults.

Would Belgium accommodate the wishes of a throwaway kid like Jesse? Today, no, but don’t bet against it 10 years from now. One of the seediest sides of euthanasia in Belgium is that investigations of its occurrences virtually never take place.

People will say that what happened last week in a largely secular Belgium could never happen here. But history is replete with ideas trashed in the never-happen bin by one generation, only to be redeemed as enlightened by another.

Euthanasia in the form of physician-assisted suicide is now available in four states to consenting adults with a terminal disease.

With appeals to compassion and dignity, the arguments in favor of it can be quite seductive.

Implicit in their acceptance, however, is the rejection of the sanctity of life. Thus, life must be viewed not as a gift from God, however one conceives him to be, but rather the creation of man alone, and hence within his province to dispose of as he wishes.

So what do you think? Will America’s most vulnerable kids really be all that safe 30 years from now?

[Daniel Leddy’s column appears each Tuesday on the Advance Editorial Page. His e-mail address is column@danielleddylaw.com. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/LegalHotShots.]